Audiences always arrive at Prada shows tingling with anticipation, braced for Miuccia Prada s next departure from the last season¿s plot. This time, she confounded expectation again, not by taking off in a new direction, but by developing the cache of ideas layered into her spring collection. That, of course, was famously about the fifties lady tourist, with an overlay of hippie-ish tie-dye among the circle skirts and knits. For winter, she took that same woman into new realms of intellectual exploration on the print front: back to the future, in fact.
"It was a dream of extreme romanticism," she said. "The idea of eighteenth-century painting, with video games. A romanticism between past and future." The cyber fantasy came in computer-generated prints on her signature big, puffy skirts and the odd quirky robot appliqué on gray T-shirts. Yet none of that seemed jarringly obtrusive in a collection that concentrated again on the in-and-out silhouette she established last season. For colder months, she¿s added more layers, adding in dip-dyed cable knits and buttonless cardigans betwixt tweeds and bejeweled fifties-style couture-like pieces. What held it all together, literally, were the cinched waists, circled in narrow grosgrain ribbon or with tie-on belts encrusted with sparkle.
It was that idea of jeweling, on collars, belts, and fabric brooches, that added the news. In a brilliant leap, she transposed those crunchy patches of decoration onto fitted down jackets—a perfect conflation of old-world luxury with classic Prada techno fabric that stood as the symbol of the entire collection.
